An Australian Exploration Company Says It May Have Found The Missing Plane In Area Where Nobody Is Looking

An Australian exploration company says it might have found the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 — and it's not in the Indian Ocean.

The company, GeoResonance, claims it has identified possible wreckage from a commercial airliner on the ocean floor in the Bay of Bengal, Australia's 7News reports.

The Bay of Bengal, marked on the map below, is about 3,100 miles from the circled area of the southern Indian Ocean where authorities have been looking for the missing plane.

Google Maps

The plane has been missing for about six weeks, and search teams have yet to find any wreckage. In March, Malaysian authorities said satellite data revealed the plane's last known location in a remote area of the Indian Ocean.

But GeoResonance claims it surveyed about 1.2 million square miles of the possible crash zone and identified "chemical elements and materials that make up a Boeing 777," a company official told 7News. GeoResonance apparently used images obtained from satellites and aircraft along with technology designed to find nuclear warheads and submarines to identify what it says is the wreckage of a plane.

The company thinks it is MH370 because the wreckage wasn't showing up on images from the same area from before the plane disappeared. GeoResonance told 7News it had sent a report about its findings to authorities on April 15.

A Malaysian aviation official told The Star newspaper that Malaysia was unaware of the report of GeoResonance's findings.

The agency that's running the search for the missing plane dismissed GeoResonance's findings, telling CNN: "The location specified by the GeoResonance report is not within the search arc derived from this data. The joint international team is satisfied that the final resting place of the missing aircraft is in the southerly portion of the search arc."

Malaysian authorities, however, are looking into GeoResonance's claims.

GeoResonance notes on its website that the company has "successfully applied [its] technology to locate submersed structures, ships and aircraft."

MH370 went missing on March 8 during a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. There were 239 people on board.